Learning to love experimental sci-art film

It may sound like a cliché when a reviewer says that the audience was a crucial part of the show, but when the movies in question are highly experimental - advertised, in this case, as "audiovisual art-science" - there's really no escaping it.

The hour-long screening of about 15 short films was part of the Subtle Technologies art and science festival, an annual symposium featuring workshops, exhibitions and lectures, all intended to bridge the divide between the arts and the sciences. The session was divided into two sets of thematically related films: the first, titled Hidden Worlds, was curated by Marco Mancuso (founder of Digicult magazine, which co-sponsored the event), the second, When the Eye Flickers, by Claudia D'Alonzo and Mario Gorni.

The films' titles, such as 10,000 Peacock Feathers in Foaming Acid, Superbitmapping and Vagina Cosmica, suggested we weren't at the cineplex any more - and the visuals left no doubt.

from Vagina Cosmica by Otolab

The write-up for Vagina Cosmica
describes it as "an induced lucid dream, a sound and optical
stimulation, a brief immersive and synesthetic [sic] voyage, in an
ancestral dimension". Another offering, called Untitled for Televisions, is described as "a brutal visual challenge". No kidding. That film, by San Francisco-based artist Scott Arford,
features white lines flashing strobe-like against a black background,
set to an equally aggressive, thumping, atonal soundtrack.

I found myself mesmerised by the visual onslaught. 10,000 Peacock Feathers, for example, features close-ups of soap bubbles illuminated by laser beams; the effect is stunning. Gestalt
by Thorsten Fleisch is an animation based entirely on a mathematical
formula for something called quaternion fractals - sometimes called
four-dimensional quaternions - which are related to the well-known Mandlebrot fractal set. Sprayby
Alva Noto features white pixels on a black background: they multiply,
move and dance; the two-dimensional pixel arrays often seem to leap out
in three dimensions. Through it all, I kept seeing things that weren't
even there (what professional sceptic Michael Shermer has called "patternicity" - the human
tendency to see order amid chaos). Suddenly I was watching a Tetris
game. Or millions of sperm seeking an egg. Or I was hearing the sound of
popcorn in an industrial popper.

from Gestalt by Thorsten Fleisch

When it was over, the audience
Q&A opened on an unusually aggressive note. "It's not art!" one
patron challenged. "They're just sequences of images!"
Mancuso handled the accusation diplomatically ("It all depends on your
point of view..."). Why did a handful of people walk out during the
intermission, asked another audience member. Were the films not entertaining enough?
"Perhaps they were too entertaining," Mancuso offered. "It was too much
for their sensorial apparatus."

He later told me that there are
few "middle ground" reactions to these films - people either love them
or hate them. But he admits they can be difficult to watch. "These
things are not easy for the audience," he said.

It got me
thinking back to a joke I remember from my undergrad days. There was a
humorous sign that the physics department's secretary had taped above
the photocopier, to ward off amateur repair engineers. "ACHTUNG!" it
began, "Das machine is nicht fur gerfingerpoken und mittengrabben..."
After a few more lines of faux-German, it concluded, "Relaxen und watch
das blinkenlights." And that, I think, is good advice for anyone viewing
audiovisual art-science. Don't overthink it. Relaxen und watch das
blinkenlights.